All of the following films mostly are mentioned in my article Timing, and The Machine of Time, but that was looking at the psychological aspect of it, partly at the mechanism and the themes of the films. This one is more for the mechanics behind the process and the method of ‘travel’ in each of them.

Bill and Ted – the ‘phone box’ being their time machine, dialling into the century you would like to go to, using technology to manipulate the streams of time.

Doctor Who – also with a phone box of sorts, but not machine. A living ship no less, which reminds of that random show a few years ago called Farscape, with a living ship.

Quantum leap – Al with his little keypad type thing called Ziggy, calculating the chances, the mission, the next leap. And the energy of Same would be transposed somewhere else, in someone else and in some other time. Random, but with purpose.

The Time Machine – a contraption to take the seated occupant to the future or the past. Being a witness and spectator to it rising and falling around you until you reach your destination.

Back to the Future – a car was used for this one, and was a great watch in its ‘time’. With extra hints at things that can happen when you meddle with time.

Harry Potter 3 – there was a watch, fitting piece of technology for its purpose, and the only one out of the lot to actually pick a timepiece, and with an extra layer, they had to return to the clock tower on the twelfth chime before the mechanism ‘wore off’. This one also being different as it showed the travellers being duplicated by this process and existing in more than one time simultaneously. The film looper also had a cross-over of timelines for the same person, another strange aspect to the idea.

All machines involved in the ‘journey’ forwards or backwards. But there are others, where it was an object and then mental projection that caused the time travel. Somewhere in Time, Weeping Angels (Dr Who episode) and The Butterfly Effect. So, are we only stuck in this time because we think we are? Mostly being taught that a) time travel as a reality is ridiculous and b) that you would need to build a machine to make it happen it if was possible. Such a ridiculous idea, that it gets mulled over again and again, as in the above stories and films, and surely too in the odd mind of a ‘scientist’, but also in the minds of people giving thought to times past and what is to come.

And this is where I will mention Chronesthesia again (having previously mentioned it as a chapter in my book and in my article about Hyperphantasia, the name given to what they have called mental time travel. “In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future”. I thought everyone did this, or at least could, but it turns out that is an incorrect assessment, and it varies greatly amongst the population. So, do we need a ‘machine’ at all I wonder, or is that we have built-in abilities for such possibilities that we almost can’t even accept them, let alone know how to access or harness them. Perhaps, or maybe we are just beholden to the straight, forward-facing line of time, only going one way and getting pulled along whether we like it or not. But maybe, just maybe, there is something else, behind the ‘face of time’, waiting for us to work it out…

(c) K Wicks